In many current techniques, applications, systems, arrangements etc. and in several technical areas (industrial systems, communications systems etc.) a data exchange is performed by use of Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a general-purpose specification for creating custom mark-up languages. In general, XML allows the users to define mark-up elements and enables sharing of structured data, encoding of documents, and/or serializing of data, for example.
However, besides the possibilities of exploiting XML and besides the broad utilization of XML in several technical areas and in several technical environments, textual XML data have the disadvantage of huge memory requirements, long processing time, and lack of compactness.
Therefore, binary XML formats for enabling a more efficient and a more memory resource saving processing of textual XML data have been introduced. Such binary XML formats are, for example, ISO 23001:1 Binary MPEG format for XML (BiM) or W3C Efficient XML Interchange (EXI).
In particular, binary XML, or Binary Extensible Markup Language, refers to any specification, which defines a compact representation of XML in a binary format. Binary XML formats generally reduce the size of XML documents and, thus, the memory requirements. Furthermore, binary XML formats reduce computing time and computing resources, for example, which arise when parsing and/or processing a XML document or file is performed.
However, with the adoption of several binary XML formats such as BiM or EXI by the market systems and devices with limited resources (e.g., small uControler such as those of the family TI MSP430) are not suitable for providing and supporting several of these binary XML formats, as for each format specific sets of finite state automaton are required, which in turn require additional memory resources.
Thus, when utilizing several binary XML formats, disadvantages with regard to increased memory requirements still exist.